It’s said that smell is the strongest sense in terms of evoking memories. While it certainly has the ability to conjure up distinct images, but for me music is the source of the strongest sense memories. Yesterday my Ipod played a series of songs that each dredged up intense recollections. There was The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel. I listened to this at a friend’s house when I was in 7th grade. We snickered at the references to sleeping with a whore (although not as broadly as we shared embarrassed giggles at the lyrics of Cecilia). Her father told us dirty jokes that I laughed at but didn’t understand til years later (Aha! So *that’s* what he meant by “eating by candlelight”!). They had a round table in their spacious kitchen with placemats in that 70s burnt orange that matched the shape of the table. She had two dogs – a bulldog who snuffled continuously and an elephant-sized mastiff named Pax. Every detail about her house came flooding back at once.

Next was Across the Universe, which I associate not with the Beatles, but with a singer called Terry Beard who was a consistent presence at Penn State in the mid 70s. This was the song he used to close his performances and the one that brings back all the times I saw him, both as a solo performer and as the opening act for Livingston Taylor and Billy Joel and a host of other local bands. Somewhere I still have the guitar pick that I grabbed when he discarded it one night.

Spamfiction: But even as the red sun peeped curiously over the horizon he was awakened by a most unusual disturbance--a succession of hoarse screams and a pounding of the air as from the quickly revolving blades of some huge windmill. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. Coming towards him at his right hand was an immense bird, whose body seemed almost as big as that of a horse.

This sounds very similar to a section of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Although in that book the victim was on a beach. And the thing that came at him was a giant lobster-like creature. And I don’t even think it was his right hand. So it was really nothing like it at all, was it?